Stalin's General (23 page)

Zhukov was not placed in charge of Moscow's defense immediately. First, on October 6, Stavka appointed Zhukov its representative to the Reserve Front he had commanded at Yel'nya and issued strict instructions that any decisions he took about the deployment and use of its troops were to be fully implemented. Then, on October 8, Zhukov was named commander of the Reserve Front in place of Marshal Budenny. Finally, on October 10 Stalin unified the Western and Reserve Fronts into a single Western Front commanded by Zhukov. Konev, the existing commander of the Western Front, was made Zhukov's deputy. A few days later, however, Konev was placed in charge of a newly formed Kalinin Front, composed of armies drawn from the Northwestern and Western Fronts, and tasked to guard Zhukov's northern flank.
¹⁸

The precise circumstances of Zhukov's appointment to command the new Western Front have been the subject of an arcane but instructive controversy. In Konev's contribution to a book on the battle of Moscow published in 1968 he claimed Zhukov was made head of the Western Front as a result of his recommendation. In the same book
Zhukov asserted that his appointment as commander of the new Western Front followed a telephone conversation with Stalin—one of many that he had with him after his return from Leningrad. During that conversation, wrote Zhukov, Stalin asked him if he had any objections to Konev being his deputy.
¹⁹
Another variation of the story, related by Zhukov to the journalist and writer Konstantin Simonov in 1964–1965, was that during the telephone call Stalin said he wanted to court-martial Konev because of the failures of the Western Front and only desisted when Zhukov persuaded the dictator that Konev was an honest man who did not deserve an end like Pavlov, the ill-fated commander of the original Western Front who was executed in July 1941.
²⁰

While Konev's version of events is supported by the documentary record,
²¹
Zhukov's assertion that he enjoyed Stalin's confidence is true, too. Zhukov's appointment to a central role in the defense of Moscow was inevitable because Stalin did not recall him from Leningrad simply to make him commander of the Reserve Front.

Behind this minor skirmish in the 1960s between the two retired generals lay a long history of professional rivalry and personal animosity. During the war Konev emerged as one of Zhukov's main rivals for fame and military glory—a rivalry that climaxed with their race to take Berlin in 1945. When Stalin demoted Zhukov after the war, Konev took his place as commander-in-chief of Soviet ground forces. In 1957 when Zhukov was dismissed by Khrushchev as minister of defense, Konev was the most prominent of his public critics, even going so far as to publish an article in
Pravda
that trashed Zhukov's war record. It is little wonder that Zhukov resented any suggestion he owed his appointment as commander of the Western Front to Konev. Indeed, Zhukov's memoirs are peppered with direct and indirect digs at Konev's performance as a wartime commander.

At the root of the personality clash between Konev and Zhukov were the similarities in their temperament and leadership style. Like Zhukov, Konev was an energetic and exacting commander who did not suffer fools gladly and was prone to hot-tempered outbursts. Equally, his preparation for battle was meticulous and his conduct of operations highly controlled. Unlike Zhukov, Konev's background was in artillery and he started his career in the Red Army as a political
commissar during the civil war. Only in the mid-1920s did he switch to a strictly military command. He then rose through the ranks, his path paralleling that of Zhukov, but not until the battle of Moscow did the two men serve together for the first—but not the last—time.
²²

Zhukov's brief as commander of the Western Front was to halt the German advance on Moscow. His problem was that he had few forces with which to do so. The Viazma and Briansk encirclements of early October had been even more disastrous than those at Minsk and Kiev in the summer. The Briansk, Western, and Reserve Fronts lost a total of sixty-four rifle divisions, eleven tank brigades, and fifty artillery regiments,
²³
leaving Zhukov with only 900,000 troops to defend the Soviet capital. Even before Zhukov's arrival Stavka had ordered a retreat to the Mozhaisk Line—a series of defensive positions about seventy-five miles west of Moscow that stretched for 150 miles from Kalinin in the north to Tula in the south. But this line did not hold for very long. By mid-October the Germans had broken through on the flanks, capturing Kalinin and threatening Tula, where there began a tremendous battle that went on for weeks. Mozhaisk was abandoned on October 18 and with the road to Moscow open, panic broke out in the Soviet capital. There were riots, looting, and mass attempts to flee the city. The tense atmosphere was heightened by rumors the authorities were preparing to evacuate the city (which they were). Nerves were steadied by a radio broadcast on October 17 by A. A. Shcherbakov, the Moscow Communist Party leader, who assured citizens that Comrade Stalin remained in the capital. The situation was stabilized further by a GKO (State Defense Council) resolution published on October 19 that declared a state of siege, imposed a curfew, and announced that Zhukov was in command of the Front defending Moscow.
²⁴
The next day Stalin rang David Ortenberg, editor of
Krasnaya Zvezda
(Red Star)—the Red Army newspaper—and ordered him to publish a picture of Zhukov. He was also told to pass the picture to
Pravda
so that they could publish it, too. When the photograph appeared in
Krasnaya Zvezda
on October 21 it was the first time the paper had printed a picture of a Front commander. The photograph was also published by
Pravda
the same day. Ortenberg claims that Zhukov later said to him the picture had only been published to ensure
he got the blame if the city fell to the Germans. The more charitable explanation is that Stalin had the picture published in order to inspire people's confidence in the defense of Moscow.
²⁵

Zhukov responded to this grave crisis in the same way as he had in Leningrad: draconian discipline; no surrender and no retreat; counterattack wherever and whenever possible. The first edict Zhukov issued as commander of the Western Front was a declaration on October 13 that “cowards and panic-mongers” fleeing the battlefield, abandoning their weapons, or retreating without permission would be shot on the spot. “Not a step back! Forward for the Motherland!” it concluded.
²⁶
This threat was as applicable to high-ranking officers as ordinary ranks. On November 3 Zhukov announced that Colonel A. G. Gerasimov, commander of the 133rd Rifle Division, and divisional commissary G. F. Shabalov had been shot for ordering an unauthorized retreat.
²⁷

It is reported that Zhukov read
War and Peace
during the battle of Moscow and it may be that Tolstoy's monumental novel set during the Napoleonic Wars inspired this appeal to patriotic sentiment: “The fields and forests where you are now standing in defence of mother Moscow are stained with the sacred blood of our predecessors who have gone down in history for their defeat of the Napoleonic hordes,” Zhukov declared to his troops on November 1. “We are the sons of the great Soviet people. We were brought up and educated by the party of Lenin and Stalin. For a quarter of a century we have built our lives under its leadership and in this hour of danger we will not spare our forces or our lives in erecting a steel wall in defence of the Motherland and in defence of its sacred capital, Moscow. Blood for blood! Death for death! The complete destruction of the enemy! For honour and freedom, for our Motherland, for our sacred Moscow!”
²⁸

Exhortations notwithstanding, Zhukov was forced to retreat to new defensive positions, initially on a line running from Klin just northwest of Moscow through Istra to Serpukhov, southwest of the city. But Zhukov's policy of constant counterattacks and withdrawal at the last possible moment had taken its toll on the enemy and by the end of October the German offensive was running out of steam. In addition, the Germans became increasingly bogged down in the autumn mud of that part of the world—what the Russians called the
Rasputitsa
(the season of bad roads). The Germans decided to pause and regroup, which gave Zhukov time to bring in reinforcements. From November 1 to 15 the Western Command was replenished with 100,000 additional troops, 300 more tanks, and 2,000 extra pieces of artillery.
²⁹

The pause also provided a political opportunity for the Soviet leadership. On November 1 Stalin summoned Zhukov to Stavka and asked him if it was safe to go ahead with the celebration on November 7 of the anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia.
³⁰
Zhukov assured him it was indeed safe, but because of the threat posed by German air raids the anniversary meeting for the party faithful was held underground, in the Mayakovsky metro station. Stalin spoke at this meeting and the next day he addressed the troops parading through Red Square on their way to the battlefield just outside Moscow. The situation was grave, Stalin told them, but the Soviet regime had faced even greater difficulties in the past:

In his conclusion Stalin worked the patriotic theme, invoking past Russian struggles against foreign invaders:

In his memoirs Zhukov was generous in his praise of Stalin's role in saving Moscow from the Germans, noting that the dictator stayed in the city throughout the battle and played a crucial role in organizing its defenses: “By his strict exactingness Stalin achieved, one can say, the near-impossible.”
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At the same time, Zhukov was at pains to distance himself from several wrong decisions by Stalin during the battle. But reading Zhukov's orders, edicts, and records of conversations during the battle of Moscow, he comes across mainly as a general willing to execute the orders of his superiors without demur and who expected the same of those serving under him. It was, above all, Zhukov's disciplined attitude that endeared him to Stalin, not his supposed forthrightness or insubordination. One example of Zhukov's hierarchical and discipline-based command style is his response on October 26, 1941, to Rokossovsky, the commander of the 16th Army, then engaged in battle with the Germans in the Istra area, who complained about the weight of German opposition against him. Zhukov told him:

When the muddy roads froze in mid-November the Germans were able to resume their offensive, making some progress on the flanks, but the Red Army's defenses held in the critical position directly west of Moscow. The turning point in the battle for the capital came at the
end of November when Stavka released reserves to plug gaps in Zhukov's defenses. Faced with fresh enemy forces and deteriorating weather conditions, the German advance on Moscow foundered only a few miles from the city center. (See
Map 11
: The Battle for Moscow, October–December 1941
.)

Zhukov and Rokossovsky clashed again during the November battles when the latter wanted to withdraw forces to the Istra River. Zhukov refused but Rokossovsky appealed over his head to Shaposhnikov, the chief of the General Staff. Shaposhnikov agreed and gave the requisite permission. When Zhukov found out he cabled Rokossovsky: “I am the Front Commander! I countermand the order to withdraw to the Istra Reservoir and order you to defend the lines you occupy without retreating one step.”
³⁴
“This was like Zhukov,” complained Rokossovsky. “In this order you could feel: I am Zhukov. And his personal ego very frequently prevailed over general interests.… Certain superiors … thought that only they could handle matters effectively and only they desired success. And shouts and intimidations had to be employed against all the rest in order to bring them over to the chief's wishes. I would also put our front commander among such individuals.”
³⁵

According to Rokossovsky this incident was only one of many during the battle of Moscow and it illustrated the difference between his and Zhukov's command style. Zhukov, Rokossovsky recalled, “had everything in abundance—talent, energy, confidence in himself” and was “a man of strong will and resolution, richly endowed with all the qualities that go into the making of a great military leader.” But, wrote Rokossovsky, “we had different views on the extent to which a commander should assert his will and the manner in which he should do it.… Insistence on the highest standards is an important and essential trait for any military leader. But it is equally essential for him to combine an iron will with tactfulness, respect for his subordinates, and the ability to rely on their intelligence and initiative. In those grim days our Front Commander did not always follow this rule. He could also be unfair in a fit of temper.”